


I Am

by StrayLiger



Category: Gundam 00
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-12 14:44:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16874799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrayLiger/pseuds/StrayLiger
Summary: I am Leesa Kujoh.I am Sumeragi Lee Noriega.I am…I am very, very drunk.





	I Am

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a really tough year, but thanks to Gundam 00 I have managed. I have wanted to do a study on Sumeragi for a while because I really relate to her-I struggle a lot with a drinking problem and with guilt that won't go away. So yeah. Here we go.
> 
> Also Sumeragi and Kati hooked up in college and you can't change my mind fight me.
> 
> And Lasse and Sumeragi hooked up at some point too you can't change my mind either. It's just sexy. Fight me

_ I am Leesa Kujoh. _

_ I am Sumeragi Lee Noriega. _

_ I am… _

_ I am very, very drunk. _

The space around her is filled with the scent of brandy; she can almost see it, like droplets of mist, in the strange, bluish glow of her terminal, the only light source in her room. It’s awful, being alone like this: there’s nothing worse than being left alone with her thoughts, her memories. But at least she knows what to do when memories start to catch up with her, biting at her heels.

Sumeragi Lee Noriega knocks back what’s left of her drink and pours herself another glass. This is her second bottle of the night and it’s already halved-usually, one bottle is enough to put her down, leave her unconscious, and allow her to spend the two or three hours she has left before being called back into the bridge in blissful darkness, but apparently, tonight, it’s going to be a little bit harder.

Oh yes. Leesa Kujoh is  _ sturdy _ . It’s gonna be difficult to put her down, tonight.

It’s funny how when you try to think about nothing, you end up doing the exact opposite. And right now, when she’s trying her hardest to not let thoughts of Leesa Kujoh in, it’s when she feels her closer than ever, worming her way into her brain. No matter how much she tries to ignore her, she keeps tripping over the ridiculous, embarrassingly bright eyed seventeen year old girl.

_ Of course _ , she thinks.  _ Of course you can’t ignore her. It doesn’t matter how much you try to deny it. You’re still her. She is still you- _

Sumeragi finishes another drink. Another drink, yes.

It’s only been a couple of months since the armed interventions started, but she now knows (or believes she knows) the people under her command well enough to know what they think about her drinking habit. Lockon has once or twice tried gently to point out that maybe she should drink a little less. Christina openly disapproves of it. And once she was dangerously close to arguing with Ian, who says she’s literally killing herself. Maybe she is. All she knows is that it’s better to be drunk than sober, even if when she closes her eyes, sometimes, there’s more black behind her eyelids than in between the stars outside the window in the observation room. She wonders how long before her liver fails, before she goes blind. 

_ So what if I am killing myself? that’s kind of the point. _

Yes, another drink. If she drinks enough, maybe she can kill Leesa Kujoh, her mistakes, her ghosts, her hurt. Or maybe Leesa Kujoh is already gone-starved, drunk herself to death, and Sumeragi is her ghost. The thought makes her laugh. Someone told her once that ghosts can’t follow you over running water; it’s bullshit, she knows that. If they can follow you into fucking  _ space _ , where can’t they go?

The first person to notice how much she drank was Kati. Kati Mannequin was a couple of years older than her, a real beauty, always the top of every class ( _ always on top of everything, me included, _ she thinks humorously), and Sumeragi still can’t understand what a girl like her had seen in Leesa Kujoh. Back then, they were in college still, and they weren’t really  _ dating _ , but Leesa liked holding hands in between classes, sharing her bed with her from time to time when it rained, kissing the beauty mark on her chin. Sumeragi still can hear her voice in her ear-she can still feel her arms wrapping slowly around her from behind.

_ Love, I think you’ve had enough. Come to bed. _

Great. Another ghost to add to the collection. The thing with Kati was fleeting, more like them drifting apart rather than breaking up, and it had been blissfully _ simple _ . Unlike other ghosts, this one doesn’t hurt to have around-not that much. At least tonight, the one particular ghost she’s been trying to drown out for years doesn’t seem to want to come to torture her, even though she secretly hopes he would. 

_ Are you trying to call him back or push him away? Coward. _

If he did, maybe she could pretend she could touch him, imagine he’s there holding her. And then she could cry her eyes out, cry herself unconscious and finally go to sleep before waking up with a head splitting hangover. She misses him so much that her brain registers it as physical pain-a strange, burning pain on the palms of her hands and on her chest, inside her mouth, behind her eyes, between her legs. 

Maybe if he came she could pretend that she could still at least apologize.

But tonight Emilio isn’t there with her tonight. And neither is Kati.

Sumeragi Lee Noriega is very alone, and so she takes another drink, spills half of it on the shirt, many sizes too big, that she ‘borrowed’ from Lasse that one time more than a year ago and ‘forgot’ to return ( _ this was a bad idea _ , he’d said,  _ maybe we shouldn’t do this again, _ and she had nodded like she believed it and they’d never talked about it again). Oh yes, she’s very,  _ very _ alone.

She can’t really kill ghosts like this, can she? She remembers reading books about vampires and monsters that screeched at the contact with holy water, back when she was a kid. Could alcohol be considered holy? She laughs, and her laughter is a hollow, humorless, flat noise. Probably not.  _ Fuck _ , she’s very drunk. But not nearly enough. She can still  _ feel _ . She wants to tear her hair out. 

_ Please, make it stop _ , she thinks, and this time, when she finishes her drink, it almost immediately comes back up, and she barely has time to run to the bathroom to empty her stomach, coughing, and crying, and wondering how long it will take before this bedtime routine actually kills her.

She thinks about it while she holds her hair back with hands that shake so much that they feel like they could shatter at any time. The images of Gundams flash inside her mind for no reason at all, zooming around in space at speeds too high to comprehend, and she throws up again-she hasn’t eaten anything in nearly two days, and at this point all that’s left for her to throw up is bitter bile.

When she’s done, she somehow manages to brush her teeth despite feeling like her hands are not attached any longer to the end of her arms. The taste of booze and vomit and loneliness lingers. Maybe she’ll have another drink. Maybe vermut, to settle her stomach. Maybe…

_ Love, I think you’ve had enough. _

Sumeragi flops onto her bed and curls on her side, squeezing her eyes shut. The room is spinning around her, the smell of alcohol overpowering and overwhelming, and she doesn’t even have the energy to place her foot down on the floor to stabilize it. The world feels like a painted pot placed on a potter’s wheel and she knows that nothing will stop it. It’s something you only understand when you’ve been drunk off your ass, or feverish, or ill-you can feel the universe spinning, and only the cool hand of a sane person on your forehead can make it stop, but Sumeragi is completely alone. 

She calls Emilio out in her mind, very softly, but he never comes.

Slowly, merciful blackness starts creeping on her, covering her like a blanket-or rather, like a pillow placed on her face, suffocating her to put her out of her misery for a couple of hours.

_ I am Sumeragi Lee Noriega. _

_ I am… Leesa Kujo. _

_ I am…  _

  
  



End file.
